Site Mobile Navigation

World News Briefs;Separatists in Kashmir Strike to Protest Slayings

A strike called by separatists after the police killed 24 militants near a Muslim shrine on Saturday closed businesses today in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir state.

The four-day strike was called by a faction of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, the organization to which the militants belonged.

Elections in Jammu and Kashmir, the first in the state since a bloody rebellion began in 1990, are planned for May. The Government appears to have been cracking down on the separatists as the elections approach.

The militants were killed on Saturday in a three-hour gun battle after they refused to surrender at their headquarters outside the compound of the Hazratbal shrine.

The militants had occupied the shrine for two days last week and then moved to a nearby house, which was destroyed by a fire after the battle. The Government said the group was piling up weapons in the house and preventing Muslims from entering the shrine. Jammu and Kashmir is the only largely Muslim area in mostly Hindu India.